From De Profundis:
A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought—the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul—and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.
Michael Tanner punned in his classic article Sentimentality that this was “the only occasion on which Oscar Wilde approached profundity.” It is also the only occasion on which he approached writing a review of Mumford & Sons, whose music I might have objected to more succinctly by pointing out its sentimentality and leaving it at that. In any case, I present this quotation for those (like the Daily Beast’s Justin Green and Patrol’s Jonathan Fitzgerald) wondering why I dislike a group that otherwise seems so unobjectionable.
Fitzgerald praises Mumford for being leaders in a movement dubbed the “new sincerity,” which calls to mind the Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s warning that “Sincerity corrupts, simultaneously, good manners and good taste.” I’m not ready to follow Gómez Dávila that far, but I would agree with Chesterton that sincerity should be commended only insofar as its opinions are correct and its emotions proportional.
October 2nd, 2012 | 5:03 pm
On the other hand, consider Albert Goldbarth, “Sentimental”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171481
October 3rd, 2012 | 2:16 am
That’s why I like the song “Gangnam Style” so much. It is completely unsentimental.
October 3rd, 2012 | 9:09 am
I have read both of the reviewer’s posts about Mumford & Sons, and I am not convinced of Mr. Schmitz’s central argument that Mumford & Son’s music is little more than trite sentimentality. Much of the band’s music reflects on love, faith, and mortality in a way that is fairly unique in popular music, such as in “Winter Wind,” where they sing:
We’ll be washed and buried one day my girl/
And the time we were given will be left for the world/
The flesh that lived and loved will be eaten by plague/
So let the memories be good for those who stay.
To be sure, this is hardly Faure’s Requiem or a Verdi opera, but it’s not too far off from the traditional Appalachian music from which it draws. It even reminds me of Robert Herrick’s 17th Century poem “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
Objectively, one has to conclude that this is considerably better, and more profound, than the vast bulk of popular country and folk music that claims to be the descendant of traditional folk music. (For that matter, it is considerably more profound than the trite and sentimental “folk music” to which most Catholics are subjected at mass every week.)
Popular music is not high art and does not pretend to be high art. The fact that any popular band is reflecting on human mortality at all separates this music from the typical bubble gum sentimentality of most popular music.
October 3rd, 2012 | 11:46 am
I also disagree that Mumford is guilty of mere sentimentalism. Is there some evidence?
October 3rd, 2012 | 4:00 pm
“A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”
What do we call a critic who wants the luxury of a dismissal without having paid for it with the actual work of criticism?
October 3rd, 2012 | 5:21 pm
Charlie Collier – ouch!
October 3rd, 2012 | 5:30 pm
[...] First Things’ Matthew Schmitz is a brave man: he continues to lead with his chin, critiquing the new Mumford and Sons album, a sentimental favorite of everyone, it seems, especially [...]
October 3rd, 2012 | 8:06 pm
for the most egregious gush of sentimentality i’ve ever come across, check out yanni playing live at the acropolis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhS6asdNNy4
this is how bad bad art can get…. i don’t know anything about mumford, but from the posted video of their red rocks concert…. well, i’ll let you compare them to yanni.
October 9th, 2012 | 10:36 am
If I may quote David Foster Wallace: “[T]he next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles in emotions in US life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousnesses and hip fatigue.”
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